represent

Playing what’s not there

Natura Morta, Giorgio Morandi, 1943, detail

Giorgio Morandi is a painter who, maybe more than any other, requires you to pass F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test for having a first-rate intelligence: the ability to hold two opposing points of view in mind at the same time without having to reconcile them. Someone not versed in art history might dismiss the charm of Morandi’s elementary style as an affectation. He is both very good and his late work also looks easily achieved. He embraces the paradox that being a 20th century artist often means having a beginner’s mind and, well, making what looks like a beginner’s marks. On the other hand, he understood how to make paintings that stood out because of what they didn’t do: he was a perceptual minimalist. He flirted with Cubism and Futurism and the Metaphysical School of De Chirico, but eventually he chose a way to paint where what he shows you almost isn’t visible. (Remember that band in the Pynchon story that thought all the notes rather than playing them?) He was a sort of monkish recluse, a J.D. Salinger of visual art, painting in his home, never marrying, living in a household he shared with three unmarried sisters. His isolation has the aura of a folk tale. Yet in his photographs he looks astute, stylish in his Bauhaus eyeglasses, with his handsome Italian visage. He was no naif. The two opposing points of view in Morandi’s case would be: a) this painting really is a pleasure to look at; b) this painting doesn’t appear to be showing me much at all. It’s sort of the definition of minimalism. Yet some minimalism looks even more minimal than the rest.

More than a decade ago, when she was working the desk at Viridian Artists, Lauren Purje introduced me to Simon Cerigo, an art consultant and collector who visited regularly. He told me he attended every gallery opening in Manhattan. I didn’t doubt it. He looked the part: intense, serious, a little disheveled from staying so assiduously informed. I enjoyed his company. He was unpretentious, laconic, and smart. In one conversation, he mentioned knowing Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. A lot of doors were open to Simon. He died young, at the age of 60, not long after we met, but during one of our random encounters he confided his recipe for art stardom, condensed to its simplest form. He wasn’t endorsing it, just passing it along as an observer of the scene. It went like this. First, you get your MFA. Learn everything a school can teach you. And then forget all of it and paint as if there were no rules. This, as he understood it, was the path that led to a career like Elizabeth Peyton’s. Back then, she was selling awkward, quickly-executed portraits of rock celebrities and others. It’s also a way to describe the impulses that gave birth to Modernism itself: learn how to do it the academic way and discard it and paint like a beast!

I’ve never forgotten Simon’s recipe. Amid all the self-conscious spectacle of much contemporary art and the calculated look-at-me Instagram gambits artists cook up, Simon’s intrigue was: learn everything you can and then forget it.  What was implied in this ostensible path to glory MORE

Idiosyncratic mastery  

Daniel Sprick

Visitors to the L.A. Art Show will be in luck: they’ll get a rare glimpse of Daniel Sprick’s work, who has been included this year in the lineup of painters at Arcadia Contemporary’s central booth. Arcadia usually serves more or less as the LA Art Show’s tent pole. It’s nearly unavoidable as you walk in. You can spend time in the booth and then really can’t escape it until you head back to the parking lot. You move out in various directions only to walk past Arcadia’s sprawling space on your way to see work on the other side of the building. Sprick’s paintings are a rare treat. He had an astonishing, definitive solo show at Arcadia a couple decades ago where he painted various scenes from his studio. Objects for him are arranged carefully to create a formal composition but his skeletons and tools and tightly bound fabrics find their place in your field of view so haphazardly that the scene looks as if he’d discovered it rather than set it up. The light in one of his paintings is liquid,  offering just enough illumination to offer precision, but rarely bright. His handling of paint in that show was flawless and tactile, bringing to mind the gifts of Gerhard Richter and even Velasquez. His skills haven’t faded. He’s able to make random arrangements of tools and objects in a studio look as if they are perfectly situated to convey exactly the quality of light falling on them through his studio windows.

John Brosio

There are dozens of other opportunities for awe at the Arcadia booth this year. Once again, guy-in-charge Steven Diamant is exhibiting an amazing quantity of masterful painting, all of it idiosyncratic, some of it quite strange and dark (stopping just this side of morbid here and there), some just the opposite, bright and affirmative and flush with vitality. Much of the work offers hyperrealistic depictions of time-shifted dreams from an indeterminate past, a transposition of slightly antiquarian styles or objects into the present, a visionary esthetic that has found a welcoming dwelling at Arcadia. John Brosio continues to depict low-rent locals or storefronts unwittingly providing a foreground for apocalyptic landscapes behind them. Occasionally he cashes in on the potential for amusing ironies in these hermetic dramas.

Adam McGalliard

You feel you are gazing into a snow globe where a couple shakes might stir up a few tornados rather than snow. Adam McGalliard, in painting after painting, juxtaposes splendidly lush bucolic scenes with a figure clothed in an antique-looking spacesuit. Like a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, his drowned subject, young and beautiful, floats, nearly submerged, in a blooming marsh, face up, eyes closed behind her helmet’s bubble of glass. Michael Chapman gives us strangely aimless, remote-feeling urban scenes, lonely even when populated with human figures, the way Hopper’s always felt. Now and then, an Albers square appears or a lost circus bear makes a cameo appearance, as if each of these paintings were a John Irving novel.

Michael Chapman

ch

Stephen Mackey offers more of his unsettlingly Gothic visions of fey children and skull-or-animal headed chimeras, not threatening enough to be visualizations of night terrors but weirdly almost soothing, the way I would imagine a vampire’s request to come inside for a bit.

Other painters take postmodern liberties with similar time-shifting but without the surreal fevered reveries. Patrick Kramer’s images offer a postmodern reprise for historic artwork: Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, brilliantly copied, but on further study it’s incomplete and falling apart:

Mary Jane Ansell

in the tromp l’oeil reproduction it becomes clear that Gericault’s painting is peeling away like wallpaper from a surface behind it. In paintings with an exquisitely finished surface where mark-making has been completely effaced, Mary Jane Ansell presents, in different settings, a young woman in a suggested narrative, sometimes as a sort of Joan of Arc with hints of a vast army behind her. The contrast between the contemporary girl-next-door beauty and the antiquarian narrative and costume intensifies the impact of both the portrait and the setting. Jong-Jae Kim offers a second nod to Edward Hopper in the show:

YongJae Kim

a reprise of Early Sunday Morning, a small town’s depopulated street with its long row of windows and doors, a sort of Hopper 2.0. Stephen Foxsubmits his astonishing drive-in movies: still images from easily recognizable films like giant nightlights glowing under dark skies in surviving drive-ins, a few cars assembled, sometimes a little lightning in the distance beyond the screen, a venue in many places still stubbornly drawing viewers willing to burn the gas needed to attend the showings. Alberto Ortega is well represented with multiple versions of his twilight and night scenes painted from dioramas he constructs himself, often with accessories—figures, buildings—from supplies for model railroad hobbyists. As with Chapman, Ortega’s scenes include

Alberto Ortega

the egg-shaped cars with rounded fenders from seven or eight decades ago. His appear along haunted residential streets with people who seem to be dazed by the dream he’s created, fixed with indecision or intent on half-hearted errands. Shaun Downey’s assiduously hyper-real portraits of women seem to float outside time; the styles of hair and clothing, the glamourous ook of the faces almost suggest mid-20^th century starlets, surrounded by flora blooming in such profusion they seem to inhabit that botanical

Shaun Downey

medium like air or water. Downey, like many of these painters, seems to be saying yes to what he most wants to see emerge as he paints, regardless of whether or not it fits with anything anyone else is doing in the art world. This ideosyncratic choice applies to many of the painters at Arcadia. It’s a choice that Thiebaud made before he emerged, when he finally decided after much anxious deliberation to paint subjects others would have thought trivial or frivolous; the same choice Inka Essenhigh made before she became as one of the most original painters working today.

The show is also replete with portraiture, figures, and still lifes each suggesting a world firmly recognizable but no less oneiric, as Bachelard would have put it. Floral paintings are a difficult feat, and many representational painters don’t have the patience for it. All of the floral work is impressive in this booth, but two examples are exceptional: Daniel Bilodeau’s peonies manage to convey exactly the texture and color of new peonies as they are just starting to bloom. The tissue-thin petals in his work are immense achievements of sustained observation and handling of his materials. His enlarged images of flowers are really cornucopias, celebrations of nature’s abundance, but they are constructed with a remarkable acts of sustained, assiduous attention. Jonquils and narcissus are extremely hard to paint effectively as well; the required variations in white and yellow don’t yield readily to a quick easy shortcuts. Jane Beharrell captures them in a simple still life that will remind everyone of the season about to return in a couple months.

Anne-Christine Roda

Mary Sauer, Miriam Hoffman, and Kesja Tabazcuk offer quasi-traditional portraiture but in each case the painter’s consummate skill and originality of vision make the sitter’s identity nearly inconsequential: the painting itself holds your attention because of the life it conveys. Each of the three artists handle paint quite differently but with skills so advanced the work looks as if it revels not just in the painter’s abilities but in the quality of the paint on the surface. Anne-Christine Roda’s image of a young woman wrapped in a white blanket could pass for a lost, newly discovered Zurburan, the work is so refined and so old-school Spanish–without looking at all dated. Dana Saltzman’s image of a bowl filled with water and a cloth, sitting on uneven ceramic tile bearing a faint blue pattern, is equal to anything Richard Maury has done in still life. Sung Eun Kim’s twilight city streets evoke the gritty romance and beauty of an American city’s ceaseless, impersonal energy, and Caren Wynne-Burke’s architectural facades with sky compete respectably with Christopher Burke’s rooflines.

The fair runs through Feb. 23, plenty of time to check it out this weekend. You can view all the Arcadia work in this online catalog: Arcadia, LA Art Show. 

Visual conversations

Jimmie, archival digital print

I showed up late for Michele Ashlee-Meade’s solo show, too late to hear her talk at SUNY/Finger Lakes Community College—only a couple stragglers were still there studying her photography. Yet the room was a beehive of silent conversation. A dozen voices spoke from the walls around us, both in the photographs, and in the brief oral histories transcribed beside them. Letters to Myself, Portraits of Adversity is a marvelous assembly of the photographer’s friends: homeless, ill, struggling with addiction, celebrating modest personal victories, remembering things that made them cry, and yet everywhere looking as if they were reveling in life.

Ana, detail

Her photographs exude emotional strength, self-awareness, wit and in a few cases startling glamour. She asked each of her subjects to write or talk briefly about themselves, mounting their statements—sometimes in their own hand—alongside each portrait at Williams-Insalaco Gallery 34.

She’s an engaging talker herself, articulate about what she’s doing with her photography, but what comes through most clearly is her deep appreciation for and delight in nearly anyone she meets. It’s what charges her work with life: this ability to see someone else from the inside out. She documents the lives of men and women she meets in all phases of her day, including her work at St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality, where she helps care for the homeless. As with Avedon’s portraiture, much of her work captures a spontaneous moment, while other portraits are posed with

Truth

care against backdrops that amplify or contrast with the subject’s character. A beautiful woman in an elegant dress bares one shoulder in front of an abandoned lot strewn with detritus. A bisexual, married woman who wanted to remain unidentifiable is covered from head to foot in black drapery, wearing eyeglasses outside her costume like Cousin Itt hiding behind a body-suit of hair. She’s posed in a narrow alley between brick walls with a fire escape behind her offering a retreat that looks more like a trap. Homeless since 2007 and sixty days sober, a smiling man lofts a half-finished pop bottle like a trophy beneath bright, white clouds.

What comes through in the faces and the personal, biographical accounts she excerpts from each subject is how much they not only have suffered adversity, but have overcome it and drawn energy from the strength it trained in them. Her images are rich with shadow—she luxuriates in value and focal contrasts that highlight the detail that give immediacy and history to her faces, yet the photographs are anything but dark. After having read the terse personal accounts of these people and recognized even more in their faces, you want to keep looking, and, most of all, to hear them keep talking.